YEE-HAW! King Ralph, white hat

& former PM Joe Clark, black hat, 

at The King's annual Stampede Breakfast

King Money Bags - Ralphie The First, Last and Always - Alberta's Premier, warned envious easterners the other day to "keep your hands off" our oil and gas riches.

Wise words, considering the royalties Alberta gets from its abundant energy sales are expected to create a $7-billion budget surplus gusher this year, bigger than all the other provinces combined.

No too long ago, Alberta and Saskatchewan

were regarded as inferior by the East

The history behind that helps in understanding why Alberta, particularly, is often resentful toward central Canada.

When Canada was founded in 1867, Hudson's Bay Company owned what's now known as Alberta and Saskatchewan. It was part of Rupert's Land, named after Prince Rupert, who founded HBC in 1670.

Canada purchased the land in 1869 and administered it as the North-West Territories.

For the country's first 38 years, most of what is the "prairie provinces" was run as essentially a colony of Canada, with less representation and rights than Ontario had as a British colony before Confederation.

Territorial leaders fought for 35 years for provincial status. Among leaders in central Canada, and the elite citizenry, the prevailing view of the Territories and their inhabitants was condescension. That didn't change much with provincehood.

Canada promoted immigration to the west from places such as Russia, Ukraine and Poland, but the settlers were seen as second-rate — uneducated, speaking little English, dirty and dirt poor.

The west was to be a market for eastern goods and a source of products to be processed in the east and exported, not a home for uppity folks who didn't see things that way.

Ottawa denied the new provinces the provincial right to control natural resources, a right the founding provinces had had since 1867. The provinces were not equal; it's easy to understand why the west complained of not being treated equally.

For 25 years, their leaders trundled by train to Ottawa to plead and cajole. No one knew the extent of the west's carbon deposits then, so the fight wasn't over oil money, just equality. Westerners simply wanted what folks down east took for granted.

In 1930, Parliament finally relented. A grudge built up over that long a time can run deep.

It is at least ironic that 1930 also began the decade of despair. The west's largely agricultural economy suffered greatly during the dustbowl '30s.

It wasn't until the post-war boom and the Leduc oil discovery of 1949 that Alberta's economy began to diversify well beyond cattle and crops, and its treasury fattened.

Until then, the province could barely dream of the kind of publicly funded facilities — what is today "infrastructure," from extensive paved highways to concert halls and more — that the east took for granted.

In this light, it's easier to understand the hostility that greeted Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program in 1980.

Only three decades in to being able to exploit resources as the east had done for 150 years, Ottawa was wresting it away again.

The result was a loss to Alberta of $50 billion, conservatively (some say double), thousands of jobs — and a deeper grudge.

Yes, some Alberta leaders overplay their regional hand at times, for political expediency. That's not unique to the west.

But today one reads and hears Ontario-based opinion leaders saying that Alberta's wealth is an accident of geography or geology, so somehow undeserved.

They seem never to consider that for more than a century Ontario built its prosperity on comparable good fortune: cheap hydroelectricity, proximity to populous markets in the United States, the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence River, bountiful forests, extensive mineral resources and more.

Alberta is proud of its rural and frontier heritage, but tires of perceptions back east that the lucky hayseeds found oil while shooting gophers.

Alberta is now among Canada's most urban provinces, with two vibrant metro areas of a million people and a handful of great, medium-sized cities.

It is not Alberta's fault that Ontario has mismanaged itself the past few decades and has a fiscal problem. But national leaders must take longer-term views.

If dark talk of "moving" on Alberta's current prosperity, which is driven by non-renewable resources, turned into concrete action, or even into an all-out political debate, a bigger problem could ensue.

Western separatism is overplayed in national media, but the latent resentment is not. Another bout of inequality in provincial rights would help turn the latter into the former.

As Alberta turns 100, Ontario asks the oft-repeated question: What does Alberta want?

The answer is as it was 90 and 80 and 70 years ago — it wants what Ontario has always had, to be seen as equal and treated equally, and not to be dismissed for making good on what it came by naturally.

That's not so much to ask after a hundred years.